Profile
The Magical Guy
Text by Becky Hepler Photos by Kevin Riley Photography Imagine a hobby that can teach you to read, and years later, pay your way through college and law school. Magical thinking? No, just ask Bobby Lilly, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Giles County and also, magician extraordinaire. “It started with kindergarten Show & Tell,” he says. “I purchased a magic set with money I got for my 5th or 6th birthday. When the little magic set arrived, I couldn’t read the directions, so Dad would help me learn one trick. He read the instructions onto a tape recorder. I ran the tape back and followed the pictures and that was part of how I 18
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learned to read.” He practiced all week and on Friday he performed the trick in kindergarten Show & Tell. The next week, the process started over again with another trick. When his teacher asked him to do a whole show, he said he had already shown his class all his tricks. She responded that the show would be for all the kindergarten classes in his school ~ and the miniature Houdini was born. Just before he went into high school, Bobby attended a magic summer camp where his counselor, a graduate of the Ringling Brothers Clown College,
taught him some basic balloon twisting techniques which he added to his show. “I learned how to make a lot of different animals, all from the basic dog form: a dog with a long neck, that’s a giraffe; a dog with a big nose, that’s elephant; a dog with long ears, that’s a rabbit,” he says. Attending national and international conventions put on by the International Brotherhood of Magicians (“We’re the other IBM,” he jokes) became the annual vacation for the Lilly family. Bobby entered performance competitions and at one in New Orleans,
S eptemb er/Octob er 2020
